Later variations
- Key People:
- John Milton
- Homer
- Virgil
- Giovanni Boccaccio
- Hesiod
The Latin epic
Latin epic poetry was initiated in the 3rd century bce by Livius Andronicus, who translated the Odyssey into the traditional meter of Saturnian verse. It was not until the 1st century bce, however, that Rome possessed a truly national epic in the unfinished Aeneid of Virgil, who used Homer as his model. The story of Aeneas’s journey, recounted in the first six books, is patterned after the Odyssey, with many imitative passages and even direct translations, while the description of the war in the last six books abounds with incidents modeled after those from the Iliad. More basically, however, Virgil made use of another model, Rome’s own national legend about the war fought under Romulus against the Sabines. This legend preserves, in a historical disguise, an original Indo-European myth about a primitive conflict between the gods of sovereignty and war and the gods of fecundity, ending with the unification of the two divine races. In the development of this theme by Virgil, Aeneas and the Etruscans can be seen as representing the gods of sovereignty and war, and the Latins representing the gods of fecundity. Aeneas, who has brought the Trojan gods to Rome, is forced to fight with the help of the Etruscans against the Latins. It is the destiny of Aeneas to rule, and it is the fate of the Latins to share their land and women with the invaders and to accept Aeneas as their king. This resembles the unification of the warring races that climaxes the Indo-European myth.
The power exercised by the Indo-European ideological pattern on the Roman mind even under the empire is seen in the Pharsalia of Lucan (39–65 ce). In this historical epic, Cato, Caesar, and Pompey are depicted respectively as moral, warlike, and popular in a way that gives the story a clear trifunctional structure.
Germanic epics
A typical heroic age occurred during the wanderings of the Germanic tribes from the 3rd to the 6th century ce. Out of this too came a rich oral tradition, from which developed in the Middle Ages many epic poems. One of the greatest of these is the Old English Beowulf, written down in the 8th century. Archetypal Indo-European themes also reappear in these epics. For example, the theme of the fatal fight between father and son is recounted in the German Hildebrandslied, of which a 67-line fragment is extant. Again, a heroic version of the Indo-European myth about the rescue of the Sun Maiden from her captivity by the Divine Twins, which also provided the basic plot of the Greek Trojan cycle and the Indian Ramayana, is found in the German Gudrun (c. 1230).
Chansons de geste
The French chansons de geste are epic poems whose action takes place during the reign of Charlemagne and his immediate successors. The Chanson de Roland, probably written down about the end of the 11th century, is by far the most refined of the group. The story of the poem had developed from a historical event, the annihilation of the rear guard of Charlemagne’s army at Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees in 778 by Basque mountaineers. The Basques, however, are transformed in the epic to the Saracens, who to a later generation typified France’s enemies in Spain. The other chansons de geste, none of which is comparable to Roland as a literary work, have been classified into three main cycles. The cycle of Guillaume d’Orange forms a biography of William (probably a historical, count of William of Toulouse, who had, like the hero of the epic, a wife called Guibourg and a nephew, Vivien, and who became a monk in 806). Guibourg, the most faithful of wives, and the noble Vivien take prominent roles in the epic. The so-called Cycle of the Revolted Knights groups those poems that tell of revolts of feudal subjects against the emperor (Charlemagne or, more usually, his son, Louis). The Cycle of the King consists of the songs in which Charlemagne himself is a principal figure.
Arthurian romance
The Arthurian romance seems to have developed first in the British Isles, before being taken to the Continent by Bretons, who migrated to Brittany in the 6th and 7th centuries. The core of the legend about Arthur and his knights derives from lost Celtic mythology. Many of the incidents in the former parallel the deeds of such legendary Irish characters as Cú Chulainn, an Ulster warrior said to have been fathered by the god Lug, and Finn, hero of the Fenian cycle about a band of warriors defending Ireland, both of whom are gods transformed into human heroes. The earliest extant works on Arthurian themes are four poems of Chrétien de Troyes, written in French between 1155 and 1185: Erec, Yvain, Le Chevalier de la Charette (left unfinished by Chrétien and completed by Godefroy de Lagny), and an unfinished Perceval. In German, after 1188, Hartmann von Aue (who also wrote two legendary poems not belonging to the Arthurian cycle, Gregorius and Poor Henry) modeled his Erec and Iwein on those of Chrétien. The story of Perceval was given a full account by Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170–1220) in his Parzival and in the unfinished Titurel. Another incomplete work of Wolfram, Willehalm, deals with the legend of William of Orange. Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg is based directly on the older French version of Thomas of Britain (c. 1170–80). The romance proper, however, although it has similarities to the epic, differs in its lack of high purpose: fictions are told for their entertainment value rather than as models for national heroism. Developed in France in the Middle Ages, the romance is usually an adventure story with a strong love interest, intimately associated with the courtly love tradition of that time.
The epic in Japan
In Japan there were in ancient times families of reciters (katari-be) whose duty was to hand down myths and legends by word of mouth and to narrate them during official ceremonies and banquets. After the introduction of Chinese letters, however, from the 4th century ce onward, these traditional tales were put in writing and the profession of katari-be gradually died out. By the end of the 7th century, each clan of the ruling aristocracy seems to have possessed a written document that recounted the mythology and legendary history of Japan in a form biased in favor of the clan concerned. These family documents were collected at the command of the emperor Temmu (672–686) and were used as basic materials for the compilation of the first national chronicles of Japan, the Kojiki (712; “Records of Ancient Matters”) and the Nihon shoki (720; “Chronicles of Japan”). The myths and legends that are contained in the earlier parts of these two books derive, therefore, from the oral tradition of katari-be. Although no document preserves those narrations in their earliest form, it is generally assumed that they were originally in the form of poems. Many scholars believe that they were genuine epic poems, which were produced during a period of incessant warfare around the 4th century. At that time mounted aristocratic warriors of the future imperial family struggled to extend its power over the larger part of Japan. Exploits of warriors, such as the emperor Jimmu or Prince Yamato Takeru, in the earliest extant texts—the Kojiki and Nihon shoki of the 8th century—probably derive from a heroic epic about the wars of conquest of the first emperors, whose legendary feats were transformed into those of a few idealized heroic figures.
The middle of the Heian period (794–1185) saw the emergence of a new class of warrior known as samurai. They attached a greater importance to fame than to life. The battles they fought became the subject of epic narratives that were recited by itinerant blind priests to the accompaniment of a lutelike instrument called a biwa.
In the early part of the 13th century, tales about the wars of the preceding century, fought between the two strongest families of samurai, the Genji, or Minamoto, and the Heike, or Taira, were compiled in three significant war chronicles. The Hōgen monogatari and the Heiji monogatari deal with two small wars, the Hōgen (1156) and Heiji (1159), in which the Genji and Heike warriors fought for opposing court factions. The structure of the two works is roughly the same. Each celebrates the extraordinary prowess of a young Genji warrior, Minamoto Tametomo in the Hōgen monogatari and Minamoto Yoshihira in the Heiji monogatari; each hero fights to the finish in exemplary manner not so much to win, for from the beginning each foresees the defeat of his own side, as for the sake of fame; and the consummate courage of the two heroes forms a striking contrast to the cowardice of court aristocrats. The bitterly fought Gempei War (1180–85), in which survivors of the Genji family challenged and defeated the Heike, is recounted in detail in the Heike monogatari, the greatest epic of Japanese literature. The sudden decline and ultimate extinction of the proud Heike, whose members had held the highest offices of the imperial court, illustrates the Buddhist philosophy of the transitory nature of all things; it invites the readers to seek deliverance from the world of sufferings through a faith that will take them to a land of eternal felicity at the moment of their death. The work is filled with tales of heroic actions of brave warriors. The most conspicuous is Minamoto Yoshitsune, one of the chief commanders of the Genji army: the legend of this man of military genius continued to develop in later literature, so that he has become the most popular hero of Japanese legend.
The later written epic
The vitality of the written epic is manifested by such masterworks as the 14th-century Italian Divine Comedy of Dante and the great Portuguese patriotic poem The Lusíads (1572) of Luís de Camões, which celebrates the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India. Novels and long narrative poems written by such major authors as Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Morris, and Herman Melville were patterned, to some extent, on the epic. Their fidelity to the genre, however, is found primarily in their large scope and their roots in a national soil; their distance from the traditional oral epic tends to be considerable.
Among more-modern epics, the Finnish Kalevala (lst ed. 1835; enlarged ed. 1849) occupies a special position. This is because its author, the 19th-century Finnish poet-scholar Elias Lönnrot, who composed it by combining short popular songs (runot) he himself had collected in Finland, had absorbed his material so well and identified himself so completely with the runo singers. He thus came close to showing what the oral epic, which he could study only at its degenerative stage, might have been at its creative stage, on the lips of an exceptionally gifted singer.
Atsuhiko Yoshida The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica